Gunnar Björnsson
Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University. Research interests include moral responsibility, moral judgments, disagreements in morals, matters of taste and epistemic modals, objectivism in ethics. Initiator and former coordinator of the Gothenburg Responsibility Project at the University of Gothenburg. Principal investigator of MMER (Moral Motivation: Evidence and Relevance) and Explanations of Responsibility, both funded by the Swedish Research Council, and Responsibility in Complex Systems, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
Address: Stockholm University: http://philosophy.su.se/gunnar.bjornsson
Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project:
http://grp.gu.se/about/gunnar-bjornsson
Moral Motivation: Evidence and Relevance:
http://phil.gu.se/mmer
PhilPeople:
https://philpeople.org/profiles/gunnar-bjornsson
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gunnar_Bjoernsson
Address: Stockholm University: http://philosophy.su.se/gunnar.bjornsson
Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project:
http://grp.gu.se/about/gunnar-bjornsson
Moral Motivation: Evidence and Relevance:
http://phil.gu.se/mmer
PhilPeople:
https://philpeople.org/profiles/gunnar-bjornsson
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gunnar_Bjoernsson
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Responsibility, collectivity by Gunnar Björnsson
In the main part of my commentary, I outline what I take to underlie normative expectations related to predictively expected acts of promoting good ends. These normative expectations are structured by pro tanto obligations to help, by evaluative autonomy, and by what I call “balancing norms,” which call on us to care about giving people and certain other values a certain comparative weight over time. Once we take this structure into account, I suggest, it is doubtful that people are assumed by default to be responsibility takers in Calhoun’s sense: what we predictively expect is also normatively expected.
In addition, I propose a way of nevertheless making good on Calhoun’s suggestion that accountability, compliance responsibility, and contributions to the common good that merit gratitude are all aspects of responsibility. Finally, I suggest that what positive reactive attitudes reveal about their targets is not that they are responsibility takers, but that they are weight-givers subject to balancing norms.
Though attributions of normative responsibilities are legion, such responsibilities have received surprisingly little philosophical attention compared to its normative relatives, obligations and reasons, and compared to retrospective responsibility. This chapter hopes to improve on this situation by taking on two main tasks. The first, attempted in section 1, is to spell out the general structure of normative responsibility, in particular the relation between normative responsibilities and corresponding obligations and demands. We suggest that normative responsibilities are constituted by normative requirements that the responsible agents care appropriately about how well things go in certain regards, and that obligations generally can be seen as straightforward upshots of requirements to care.
The second task, taken on in section 2, is to provide an overview of prominent sources of normative responsibility and its distribution among agents. Why would the children’s wellbeing be the parents’ responsibility? Why not the neighbor’s, or the state’s, or everyone’s? Here we discuss a range of possible sources, including agents’ abilities, costs involved in taking on the responsibility in question, retrospective responsibility for the situation, promises or contracts, and certain social relationships.
(1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties.
(2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of the group, duties to take steps responsive to the others with a view to the group’s φ-ing or express willingness to do so.
In support of the first claim, Collins argues that only groups that can make decisions can bear duties, and that the ability to make decisions requires the relevant sort of decision-making procedure. I suggest that both parts of this argument remain in need of further support. I furthermore argue that Collins’ account of coordination duties gets certain kinds of cases wrong, and suggest that attributions of duties to groups without decision-making procedures are more plausibly understood as attributing shared duties.
In previous work, I have argued that a general understanding of individual obligations extends non-mysteriously to irreducibly shared obligations, rendering attributions of obligations to groups legitimate. In this paper, I spell out how the proposed account also helps us understand the relation between individual and shared obligations. Even though few individual human agents have any significant control over whether we will be successful in preventing climate catastrophe, our collective capacity to prevent catastrophe and shared preventative obligation to do so can give rise to significant individual obligations to contribute to its fulfillment.
In response to this agency challenge, philosophers who want to defend attributions of collective obligations to groups of these kinds have either (i) argued that the groups in question have the requisite capabilities to have obligations of their own or (ii) suggested ways in which the existence of related individual obligations can make it true that these groups have obligations. Philosophers who have defended attributions of collective responsibility and blameworthiness have suggested that members of the relevant collectives can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome.
This chapter details some cases where it is natural to attribute obligations or blameworthiness to groups that cannot be plausibly attributed to their individual members, and discusses the agency challenge mentioned above as well as proposed replies and problems and prospects for these. The most promising replies, I will argue, understands these groups’ obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents.
The overall purpose of this paper is two-fold: to assess N&M’s proposal and to see whether the Explanation Hypothesis is compatible with or capable of accounting for the relevant data. Sections 2 through 4 provide the background: a brief overview of some of the recent studies of folk intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility, an equally brief discussion of their philosophical relevance, an outline of how the Explanation Hypothesis accounts for some results from these studies, and a presentation of the experiments that seem to support the Bypass Hypothesis. In sections 5 through 10, I present a number of problems for the Bypass Hypothesis and alternative interpretations of the experimental data adduced in its support. I also argue that a variety of experimental studies by myself and others provide strong reason to reject the hypothesis and accept the alternative interpretations, interpretations consonant with the Explanation Hypothesis.
In the main part of my commentary, I outline what I take to underlie normative expectations related to predictively expected acts of promoting good ends. These normative expectations are structured by pro tanto obligations to help, by evaluative autonomy, and by what I call “balancing norms,” which call on us to care about giving people and certain other values a certain comparative weight over time. Once we take this structure into account, I suggest, it is doubtful that people are assumed by default to be responsibility takers in Calhoun’s sense: what we predictively expect is also normatively expected.
In addition, I propose a way of nevertheless making good on Calhoun’s suggestion that accountability, compliance responsibility, and contributions to the common good that merit gratitude are all aspects of responsibility. Finally, I suggest that what positive reactive attitudes reveal about their targets is not that they are responsibility takers, but that they are weight-givers subject to balancing norms.
Though attributions of normative responsibilities are legion, such responsibilities have received surprisingly little philosophical attention compared to its normative relatives, obligations and reasons, and compared to retrospective responsibility. This chapter hopes to improve on this situation by taking on two main tasks. The first, attempted in section 1, is to spell out the general structure of normative responsibility, in particular the relation between normative responsibilities and corresponding obligations and demands. We suggest that normative responsibilities are constituted by normative requirements that the responsible agents care appropriately about how well things go in certain regards, and that obligations generally can be seen as straightforward upshots of requirements to care.
The second task, taken on in section 2, is to provide an overview of prominent sources of normative responsibility and its distribution among agents. Why would the children’s wellbeing be the parents’ responsibility? Why not the neighbor’s, or the state’s, or everyone’s? Here we discuss a range of possible sources, including agents’ abilities, costs involved in taking on the responsibility in question, retrospective responsibility for the situation, promises or contracts, and certain social relationships.
(1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties.
(2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of the group, duties to take steps responsive to the others with a view to the group’s φ-ing or express willingness to do so.
In support of the first claim, Collins argues that only groups that can make decisions can bear duties, and that the ability to make decisions requires the relevant sort of decision-making procedure. I suggest that both parts of this argument remain in need of further support. I furthermore argue that Collins’ account of coordination duties gets certain kinds of cases wrong, and suggest that attributions of duties to groups without decision-making procedures are more plausibly understood as attributing shared duties.
In previous work, I have argued that a general understanding of individual obligations extends non-mysteriously to irreducibly shared obligations, rendering attributions of obligations to groups legitimate. In this paper, I spell out how the proposed account also helps us understand the relation between individual and shared obligations. Even though few individual human agents have any significant control over whether we will be successful in preventing climate catastrophe, our collective capacity to prevent catastrophe and shared preventative obligation to do so can give rise to significant individual obligations to contribute to its fulfillment.
In response to this agency challenge, philosophers who want to defend attributions of collective obligations to groups of these kinds have either (i) argued that the groups in question have the requisite capabilities to have obligations of their own or (ii) suggested ways in which the existence of related individual obligations can make it true that these groups have obligations. Philosophers who have defended attributions of collective responsibility and blameworthiness have suggested that members of the relevant collectives can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome.
This chapter details some cases where it is natural to attribute obligations or blameworthiness to groups that cannot be plausibly attributed to their individual members, and discusses the agency challenge mentioned above as well as proposed replies and problems and prospects for these. The most promising replies, I will argue, understands these groups’ obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents.
The overall purpose of this paper is two-fold: to assess N&M’s proposal and to see whether the Explanation Hypothesis is compatible with or capable of accounting for the relevant data. Sections 2 through 4 provide the background: a brief overview of some of the recent studies of folk intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility, an equally brief discussion of their philosophical relevance, an outline of how the Explanation Hypothesis accounts for some results from these studies, and a presentation of the experiments that seem to support the Bypass Hypothesis. In sections 5 through 10, I present a number of problems for the Bypass Hypothesis and alternative interpretations of the experimental data adduced in its support. I also argue that a variety of experimental studies by myself and others provide strong reason to reject the hypothesis and accept the alternative interpretations, interpretations consonant with the Explanation Hypothesis.
Longer abstract:
Moral non-cognitivists hope to explain the nature of moral agreement and disagreement as agreement and disagreement in non-cognitive attitudes. In doing so, they take on the task of identifying the relevant attitudes, distinguishing the non-cognitive attitudes corresponding to judgments of moral wrongness, for example from attitudes involved in aesthetic disapproval or the sports fan’s disapproval of her team’s performance. We begin this paper by showing that there is a simple recipe for generating apparent counterexamples to any informative specification of the moral attitudes. This may appear to be a lethal objection to non-cognitivism, but a similar recipe challenges attempts by non-cognitivism’s competitors to specify the conditions underwriting the contrast between genuine and merely apparent moral disagreement. Because of its generality, this specification problem requires a systematic response, which, we argue, is most easily available for the non-cognitivist. Building on premisses congenial to the non-cognitivist tradition, we make the following claims: (1) In paradigmatic cases, wrongness-judgements constitute a certain complex but functionally unified state, and paradigmatic wrongness-judgments form a functional kind, preserved by homeostatic mechanisms. (2) Because of the practical function of such judgements, we should expect judges’ intuitive understanding of agreement and disagreement to be accommodating, treating states departing from the paradigm in various ways as wrongness-judgements. (3) This explains the intuitive judgements required by the counterexample-generating recipe, and more generally why various kinds of amoralists are seen as making genuine wrongness-judgements.""
Keywords: Motivational internalism, amoralists, moral motivation, intuitions
After explaining why this argument should be taken seriously (recent arguments notwithstanding), I argue that it is nevertheless undermined by considerations of moral disagreement. Even if the metaphysical, epistemic and semantic commitments of objectivism provide little or no evidence against it, and even if the alternative explanations of ‘objectivist’ traits of moral discourse and thinking are speculative or contrived, objectivism is itself incapable of making straightforward sense of these traits. The appearance of deep and widespread moral disagreement strongly suggests that the explanations operative in paradigmatically objective discourse fail to carry over to the moral case. Since objectivism, no less than relativism, non-cognitivism and error theory, needs non-trivial explanations of why we behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, such behavior does not presently provide reason to accept objectivism.
The most influential support for absolutism comes from an argument with two related premises. According to the first premise, moral thinking and moral discourse display a number of features that are characteristically found in paradigmatically absolutist domains, and only partly in uncontroversially non-absolutist domains. According to the second, the best way of making sense of these features is to assume that absolutism is correct.
This paper defends the prospect of a non-ad hoc, non-absolutist, explanation of these "absolutist" features, thus calling into question the second premise. But instead of attempting to directly explain why the moral domain displays these features, it attends to how they are partially displayed by paradigmatically non-absolutists judgments about taste and likelihood. Based on this, it proposes independently motivated general accounts of attributions of agreement, disagreement, correctness and incorrectness that can explain both why absolutist domains display all "absolutist" features and why these non-absolutist domains display some. Based on these accounts, it provides preliminary reasons to think that these features of moral discourse can be given a non-absolutist explanation.
Many have believed, and seemingly on good grounds, that these questions lack good answers, and that emotivism is doomed for that very reason. What I will argue, however, is that once emotivism is recognized for what it is, namely an empirical theory about the psychological nature of moral opinions, and once we relate it to a general theory of human reasoning, moral reasoning and intuitions of inconsistency and consequence are only to be expected. Recent objections to earlier emotivist or “expressivist” accounts can thus be met, and the phenomena of inconsistency and consequence fully embraced by emotivists.
In this paper, we offer an explanation of why certain locutions invite insensitive assessments, focusing primarily on ’tasty’ and ’might’. We spell out some reasons why felicitous insensitive assessments are puzzling and argue briefly that recent attempts to accommodate such assessments (including attempts by John MacFarlane, Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies) all fail to provide more than hints at a solution to the puzzle. In the main part of the paper, we develop an account of felicitous insensitive assessments by identifying a number of pragmatic factors that influence the felicity of assessments. Before closing, we argue that the role of these factors extend beyond cases considered in the debate about assessor-relativism and fit comfortably with standard contextualist analyses of the relevant locutions.
Contributors: Fredrik Björklund, Gunnar Björnsson, James Dreier, Daniel Eggers, John Eriksson, Ragnar Francén Olinder, Antti Kauppinen, Jeanette Kennett, Kate Manne, John Thomas Mumm, Jesse Prinz, Michael Ridge, Michael Smith, Caj Strandberg, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Teemu Toppinen, Jon Tresan, Nick Zangwill.